hyssyttely

From behind 1.58

Boil 1.59

I have made it to Melbourne! The city by the bay has opened me again with greeting arms! You will be gratified to know that the City Circle Tram still runs. I spent much of my first three days here on it, scanning my Festival Program, lighting small fires and drinking a toast each tome I passed Flagstaff Station. Is Flagstaff still Cousin Fyodor’s favourite landmark in the world? I suppose a man who has never left his room cannot be choosy about such things. Tell him the station still remains closed on Sundays despite his letter writing campaign. I have made a pencil sketch for him to hang above his wife.

Tonight I will be seeing John Ralston Saul discuss the Collapse of Globalism. There are rumours that he will do so nude as a mnemonic device for the audience, like Uncle Gryshkin at Sonia’s first wedding. Let us hope the great thinker does not share Gryshkin’s Complaint. I have never seen so much untouched food in my life.

Ralston Saul argues that the idea of globalism is dead, and that nationalism has returned to fill the vacuum. We must keep this from Grandfather at all costs. His dream of selling beetroots to the Swedes is the only thing keeping him alive. That and his linked chain of colostomy bags. Can he not be convinced to remove each one as it fills? And that giving them faces does not fool anyone that they are his cats?

Sunday, August 28, 2005

hyssyttely

File 1.31

U2 as Badiou-ian revolutionaries? Unlikely. Surely the problem with Blairite capitalist culture is not a lack of “yearning, the horizon, the utopian", let a lone a lack of “hairy-chested wailing.” On the contrary, capitalism now thrives on a certain sort of passion. U2 are a great engine for constructing a ’sincerity’ with no content (they mean nothing, but they really mean it). This is the same sincerity that is at issue when arguments about the Iraq war shift to discussions of Tony Blair’s character, with what he believed in the run up to the war. The absence of WMDs serves to retrospectively make him more sincere; thus, the more wrong Tony Blair turns out to be, the more justified he can claim the invasion was. The affects of passion and sincerity are the cornerstone of what k-punk calls innocynicism, the ruling ideology right now.

Touché guv'nor, touché. Problematising the "sincerity" as "insincere" is always permitted, but questioning the "other" flaw in "sincerity" - namely that it is ignorant, self-deluded, pathologic, in denial, or otherwise false without its own knowledge of this falsity- is usually taken as a personal affront, insult, etc. Among other things, this coupling of 'enjoyment' (of the self) and 'sincerity' is a deeply anti-modern dreaming, one that wants to supercede modernity and return to what is assumed to be a pre-modern (Athenian?) state of subjecthood. Here no ambivalence about 'values' and 'decisions' is felt, etc. and being and subject still travel side by side, quietly and in harmony. It's cast as an age before alienation, even before desire, where virtue is really just he pre-modern term for function Or so the myth prevailing in the Geisteswissenschaften (even Lukacs) goes...

Sunday, August 21, 2005

File 1.30

Spoil 1.48

I was level with a lawnmower contraption when a shaggy giant in groundman's overalls rose from the Earth like Ye Greene Knycht. He was removing the remains of a hedgehog from its blades with his bloody hands. 'Off somewhere?''You bet I am! To the land of the living.' I strode on. Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves. I was disorientated to discover how the drive wound back to the dining-room annexe. I had taken a bad turn. The Undead of Aurora House watched me through the wall of glass. 'Soylent Green is people!' I mocked their hollow stares, 'Soylent Green is made of people!' They looked puzzled - I am, alas, the Last of my Tribe. One of the wrinklies tapped on the window and pointed behind me. I turned and the ogre slung me over his shoulder. My breath was squeezed out with his every stride. He stank of fertilizer. 'I've better things to do than this...''Then go and do them!' I struggled in vain to get him in a neck-lock, but I don't think he even noticed. So I used my superior powers of language to chain the villain: 'You cruddy ruddy rugger-bugger yob! This is GBH! This is illegal confinement!'He bear-hugged me several degrees tighter to silence me, and I am afraid I bit his ear. A strategic mistake. In one powerful yank my trousers were pulled from my waist - was he going to bugger me?D. Mitchell, The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, 179

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

ARLANC 1.36

ARLANC. 1.35

Blind, emaciated fiddler performed for coins. Now he could play. Requested 'Bonsoir, Paris!', and he performed with such élan I pressed a crisp five-franc note into his hand. He removed his dark glasses, checked the watermark, invoked his pet saint's name, gathered his coppers and scarpered through the flower-beds, laughing like a madcap. Whoever opined, 'Money can't buy happiness,' obviously had far too much of the stuff.Letters from Zedelghem, Evening, 16th, viii, 1931

It is frequently stated that Pynchon was a student of Vladimir Nabokov, who then taught literature at Cornell. Nabokov himself later had no memory of Pynchon, and claimed no familiarity with his works; however, his wife Vera recalled grading Pynchon's examination papers, but only because of Pynchon's peculiar half-printing, half-cursive handwriting. (See Nabokov's Strong Opinions.) Further investigations, documented in J. Kerry Grant's A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49, have suggested that Pynchon may only have audited Nabokov's course. Link

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

ARLANC 1.33

In the end, it was a Bach motet that shooed me away - choristers weren't damnably bad, but the organist's only hope for salvation was a bullet through the brain. Told him so, too - tact and restraint all well and good in small-talk, but one mustn't beat around the bush where music is concerned.R. Frobisher, Letters from Zedelghem,Evening, 16th - viii - 1931

Sunday, August 14, 2005

From behind 1.55

Spoil 1.46

In life, Marlon Brando was an actor and something of an eccentric. In death, he is about to become a published author.A pirate adventure story he co-wrote 30 years ago has been turned into a novel. Set in the 1920s, Fan Tan, tells the story of an overweght adventurer who is seduced by a beautiful female pirate into stealing silver from a British ship.Guardian Weekly, Aug 12-18, p.20

File 1.28 "Like penguins in the jungle"

The masked revolutionary icon of Latin America, Subcomandante Marcos, emerged from the Mexican jungle for the first time in four years [...] He carried with him a chicken dressed to look like a penguin - the unlikely new symbol of a revolutionary movement [...]Guardian Weekly, Aug 12, p.3

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

From behind 1.53

Boil 1.56

"Ahh for the days when aviation was a gentleman's pursuit."

It would appear that SideshowBob is a subscriber of The Chap, a publication that now stands at the forefront of a nostalgic but stubborn return to the splendorous glory of etiquette and attire. As The Chap so intruigingly inquires:

What, dear friends, has become of our culture? Was not this once a country where jazz beatniks rubbed shoulders with aged philosophers in smoky cafeterias? Did not dapper men in horn-rimmed spectacles once explain the mysteries of the world to us via our crackling wireless sets? Were not public libraries the places where all human knowledge was to be found, at the fingertips of avuncular librarians swaddled in tweed? Where has all this gone?

Caught atwixt romantic and anarchic follies here at O&K, we highly recommend the sober advice on Sartorial Agony, and the Manifesto.

Sunday, August 07, 2005

Boil 1.55

Urr, avast ye jejune landlubbers, haul the plank and divvy the booty, scurvy Pirates be we on the ABC:

Captain Night Air sets sail into murky pyratical waters - with rum in hand and parrot on shoulder - but once out on the high seas we discover pirates in all shapes and sizes: from peg-legged Blackbeards to cross-dressed Irishwomen - from radio renegades to sea shanty balladeers. It's all about plunder and villainy tho', and don't forget the plank-walking.

What does man acutally know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him - even concerning his own body - in order to confine and lock him withing a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the bloodstream, and the intricate quivering of the fibres? She threw away the key. And woe to that fatal curiosity which might one day have the power to peer out and down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and then suspect that man is sustained in the indifference of his ignorance by that which is pitiless, greedy, insatiable, and murderous - as if hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger.F. Nietzsche, On truth and lies in a nonmoral sense

It would appear that the philosophical discourse on art had the aim to make us forget art, to conceal it, and to guarantee the art-overcoming sublation in favour of reason and truth. And why else this concealment if not for the reason that art disquiets >>the spirit<Sarah Kofman, The Melancholy of Art